"Annotate the world," say the founders of the website formerly known as Rap Genius. "The internet contains multitudes," they say (in an allusion that somehow turns Walt Whitman into the internet). And they want those multitudes, Whitmanesque or otherwise, to be annotated. Hence the new name and premise of the site, now called Genius, which is no longer just for lyrics but is, in theory, for everything.

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The site began in 2009 as RapExegesis, a place for people to annotate rap lyrics. The three founders—friends who met as undergrads at Yale—quickly renamed the site Rap Genius; Two years later they joined Y Combinator and raised $1.8 million. Between then and now, the site has expanded to include much more than just rap lyrics.

The goal of Genius is to make all text on the internet, on any website, annotatable. For now, Genius will offer a tool that will allow users to annotate text and then to embed the annotations into their own sites. Eventually, Genius wants to move from being a middleman to offering a tool that site owners could use to allow their uses to make annotations directly.

The new effort and name is backed by $40 million in funding from Dan Gilbert and Andreessen Horowitz. The site is now run by two of its three founders. (One, Mahbod Moghadam, was ousted after he annotated Elliot Rodger's UCSC murder manifesto with misogynistic and just plain useless comments.)

Technically, it's up to the Genius "community" to edit away useless and insulting annotations. (In a way, by forcing Moghadam to leave, that's exactly what happened.) But that's a grand project for a site where users have long found meaning where there really is none—and for a site whose draw and whimsy comes, in part, from that made-up meaning.

In celebration of such annotations, here's a glimpse at what all-encompassing Genius offers:

• from meta.genius.com: "What is an Editor?": "someone who knows how to construct a great annotation, has the judgement [sic] to make Genius pages look amazing, and is a positive presence in the community," which is achieved through—you guessed it!—"editing."

• from x.genius.com: "1040": "Add lines 44 and 45," one of the few straightforward types of step on tax forms, gets translated: "Grab Line 44, The Sum of All Taxes, and add it to Line 45."

• from x.genius.com: "Graduation Speech at Syracuse (2013)": Instead of exploring, say, George Saunders' tendency to write in a casual highbrow vernacular (e.g. "It's a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I'd say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: 'Try to be kinder'"), annotators here give us "dog":